FriendFeed Blocked In Iran, The Service's Most Active Region

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By now, you’ve probably heard all about the controversy surrounding the Iranian election and subsequent protests. If not, check here for a solid roundup. And you’ve probably also heard how this has spilled over into the tech world because Twitter has been one of the key points of contact between those inside Iran dissenting, and the outside world. If Twitter escaped being blocked by the Iranian government, you’d think FriendFeed would have too, right? Nope.

FriendFeed has been “almost completely blocked” in Iran, co-founder Bret Taylor tells us. You might not think this matters too much since FriendFeed is much smaller than Twitter in terms of users, but the service was hugely popular in Iran, Taylor says. In fact, Iran is one of the service’s most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day, according to Taylor.

Now you can see why Iran apparently wanted to block it. FriendFeed is great at facilitating conversations around topics. The reason for this is that it’s so quick to post a comment and have it be added to a thread. While this can sometimes lead to an angry mob situation, it also can be extremely effective at having a conversation about an important topic in real-time. Except, of course, when the Iranian government blocks you.

The only people getting on to FriendFeed from inside Iran now are apparently doing so through proxies.

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CrunchBase

OverviewFriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They've brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating.
FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of …

OverviewTwitter is a global social networking platform that allows its users to send and read 140-character messages known as “tweets”. It enables registered users to read and post their tweets through the web, short message service (SMS), and mobile applications.
As a global real-time communications platform, Twitter has more than 400 million monthly visitors and 255 million monthly active users around …